About the Digital Future of Public Service Media
The media landscape is changing at a breakneck pace. Media can now be consumed over a plethora of devices anywhere, anytime, and on-demand. The advent of digital convergence and broadband wireless technology creates enormous opportunities to fulfill pressing public needs in areas such as education and workforce development, civic discourse, and public health. But in an era in which resources for public service media and R&D for advanced educational technology are tight, technological change also poses enormous challenges.
For several years, the Wireless Future Program has advocated that significant portions of the tens of billions of dollars in federal revenue expected from spectrum auctions should be earmarked for reinvestment in a range of civic, educational and public media priorities. These unmet needs include free media time for political candidates, expanded civic discourse, quality children’s and educational programming, and advanced educational content and software. It also includes the unfunded costs of preserving, modernizing and expanding America’s public broadcasting system for the on-demand digital media era.
In the next few years, particularly in the context of completing the DTV transition, Congress will make decisions on how to allocate tens of billions of dollars in spectrum auction revenue -- much of it stemming from the return of spectrum now used for broadcasting analog TV. These “spectrum trust” concepts are already embodied in legislative initiatives -- such as the “free air time” bill introduced by Senators McCain, Feingold and Durbin; and the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DOIT) bills introduced by Reps. Markey and Regula and Gillmor in the House; and by Sens. Snowe, Burns, Dodd and Durbin in the Senate.
Another of these ideas is the earmarking of spectrum auction revenue to create an endowment to transform public broadcasting for the digital era. New technologies and the conversion to digital broadcasting (DTV) present public broadcasters with expanded opportunities to meet critical American needs and serve the public, as well as new challenges to produce content for multiple distribution platforms. To take advantage of these opportunities and meet the challenges, however, public broadcasters will require substantial and additional sources of funding. In 2004, PBS asked New America to help lead an independent, bipartisan and high-profile task force -- a “Digital Future Initiative” co-chaired by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt and former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale. Over the course of a year, the initiative engaged the entire public broadcasting system (CPB, PBS, NPR, and local stations) and prominent national thought leaders from outside of it to articulate a vision of the digital future for public service media, and to develop proposals for a public media trust fund to finance that vision. The DFI task force includes representatives from each of the four public broadcasting entities (CPB, PBS, NPR and APTS, the stations’ group), as well as business, communications, media and policy experts.
Program director Calabrese drafted the panel’s 125-page final report, Digital Future Initiative: Challenges and Opportunities for Public Service Media in the Digital Age, which was released in December at a day-long Summit on the Future of Public Broadcasting. The report outlines the panel’s far-reaching recommendations in the areas of lifelong education, civic engagement, public health and emergency preparedness. It further recommends the creation of an ambitious Public Service Media Web Engine -- a curated, customizable gateway to public service media content, as well as other noncommercial media -- to be available online and on-demand via home computers, PDAs, iPods and other portable digital platforms. December’s summit also marked the launch of several Working Groups on the implementation of DFI recommendations. New America plays a continued role in the deliberations of these working groups and in seeking funding for implementation.
